In the late Spring of 1986, I recall students at my High School were galvanized by the release of a movie about young American fighter pilots starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer titled “Top Gun”. At the time of it’s release, it was the newest of the trendy jingoistic modern American Military action flicks. The year before, the most popular of this 1980’s Hollywood trend of rah-rah action yarns was “Rambo: First Blood Part 2”, these flicks were making ass loads of cash. The hippest thing I can say about “Top Gun” was that it was directed by Tony Scott, who knows how to use filters and make everything look like the prettiest and sharpest Budweiser commercial-looking film ever, “Top Gun” is a beautiful and emotionally manipulative film, it’s like a live-action recruiting poster for young males with developing and malleable brains. The moment “Top Gun” lost me, honestly, is when Military Brass in the film were teaching Tom Cruise’s character Maverick about US air dogfight records from war to war and they began droning on about the United States’ military air superiority in Vietnam and I was thinking “Wait, did the Vietnamese even have any fucking planes?”.
As no surprise to anyone, legend has it that the US Military higher ups were overjoyed to consult, assist and contribute to the making of “Top Gun”. The film after all, through no fault of it’s own, is aged wine in a new bottle; the nationalistic military film where characters perform their duties while misty eyed about the flag. Then, a few years later when I was in my early Twenties, I heard about another movie that concerned the modern US Air Force, but apparently US Military higher-ups were not as keen on this film as they were the Tom Cruise flick, this other movie was a direct-to-cable film made for Showtime titled “Flight of Black Angel”. Released on Cable and Video in 1991, the film concerns themes and messages that are not stroking the prestige and integrity of the US Military, while carrying out an impressive-looking (For cable, an explanation of that in a minute) pulse pounding action movie. While some of it’s components come off as amateurish to a degree, it gives the picture a B-movie charm at times, it contains a throwback mix of Left and Right-wing perspectives. The film also contains a surprising amount of intelligent-sounding Military and scientific jargon while mixing in some stereotypical character development stories that are actually not as interesting as scenes where people are discussing specific types of weapons being mounted onto a fighter jet or discussing what it would take to manually arm a nuclear bomb, I am here for the table talk.
“Flight of Black Angel” was directed solidly by Jonathan Mostow, he went on to direct several theatrical films, including “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”. Considering the low-budget production values, the strange uniforms and look of the US Military (also, to be explained shortly), the movie sometimes carries a narrative of a High School civics class scenario film, Mostow does a credible job, however. The movie wastes too much time with a side plot involving a young couple with a baby, but it leads to an excuse for well done shoot-outs. Some of the action scenes here have this strange look to them and the look of the US troops here look like they are from a foreign Government.
Despite it’s production and staging limitations, there is something oddly mystical and engaging about this little cable movie. It’s creators have a message and the film walks a philosophical tightrope between offering tidings to the action adventure crowd and cynicism to the anti-nukes and military overreach activists. The movie essentially puts forward a hypothetical situation of what if a Charles Whitman-type character was a trained US fighter pilot and got hold of a nuclear weapon. Charles Whitman, if you may recall, was a US Marine with an Evangelical upbringing who experienced a psychotic break at some point and barricaded himself in a fortified position at the top of a tower on the campus of the University of Texas in 1966, where he went on to kill civilians from his perch until Austin, Tx police officers finally shot him dead, but not before he killed over a dozen people with a high-powered rifle. It was later discovered that Whitman’s religious fervor had some influence in his sudden desire to kill people, having killed his own family as well before his deadly tower assault began. An excellent TV movie, “The Deadly Tower” (Directed by Jerry Jameson) was made about the Whitman shootings in 1975, starring a young Kurt Russell as the troubled murderous sniper.
In “Flight of Black Angel” we are introduced to Captain Eddie Gordon, played by William O’Leary, an aggressive young fighter pilot who is being trained by the wiser Lieutenant Colonel Ryan, played by Peter Strauss. Strauss starred in quite a few hip TV movies, “Rich Man, Poor Man”, “The Jericho Mile”, “Masada” and “Under Siege” (A 1986 TV movie that had Arab Terrorists waging war inside the United States, not the Stephen Seagal movie of the same title released Four years later.) come to mind. “Flight of Black Angel” opens with a fairly harrowing opening sequence, considering that the scene involves war games that are intended to be exclusively drills. We are introduced to Captain Gordon and his superior while they are in the air. Gordon shows himself to be hyper competitive, somewhat of a pariah to the other young pilots, in part because Gordon is so superior to them as pilots as well as he behaves distant and dismissive of them, Gordon appears focused while the others appear pretty and shallow. Gordon takes unnecessary risks during the flight simulations, to the concern of his superior officer. Unlike the other young pilots who appear to have a cavalier attitude about military training, Gordon is all business.
Strauss as Ryan, tells Gordon to back off, that he is putting lives in danger with is air cowboy recklessness. Gordon then proceeds to take a few days off, in part to celebrate his birthday with his evangelical family. The scenes involving Gordon and his family are tense, we know something is building, we’re just not sure what. It seem quite apparent that all in the nuclear family are afraid of Gordon to a degree, they theoretically tread on egg shells around him. There is an uneasy tension at the family dinner table as well in front of the family television, where the family watches religious related programs together. Gordon’s Father buys him a scope for a hunting rifle for his Birthday. Gordon goes target shooting not long after and in the midst of target shooting, contemplates shooting himself in the head.
A decisive moment in the script, written by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, is where the culture of the American Evangelical conjoins with the Firearms crowd, a scatological pairing that the script infers leads to a perversion by some of their self-proclaimed Christian values. The manifestation of the Anglicized Taliban occurs when Gordon’s family is now terrified of the monster that they have created, using previously the child rearing unspoken guide lines of the far-right; God, guns and a silence of the Female perspective. Here the Evangelical Camp is portrayed as inspiring Gordon to not only think that his existence has worldwide importance, but historical importance as well. He begins his murderous crusade by taking out his family while they are not expecting it and in a passive state, watching television.
Now a murderer, unbeknownst to the public and the Military he works for, Gordon calmly heads back to work at the Air Force Base in the desert (His family lives in Las Vegas) to get ready for the day’s schedule of Military Air War Games. Colonel Ryan is prepping his other understudies to approach the day’s war games and deal better with the highly-focused Gordon. Gordon manipulates things through the Military’s computer system, enabling himself (with an additional on-camera murder of a Female co-worker) to arm his plane with live ammunition, real missiles and bombs and a nuclear warhead. When the aerial daily war games commence, Gordon is armed to the teeth as he flies against training pilots with no actual weapons on board. While Gordon is in the air with the Colonel and his recruits, word arrives back at base that Gordon’s family has been murdered. In one of the several extremely cynical moments in the movie, the Military has not put it together that Gordon may be responsible, on the contrary, they believe to withhold the news from him until he is done with his day of Air Training. Now that they are all in the air for the day’s training, Gordon begins picking off the trainees one by one until only the Colonel is left. The Colonel survives thanks in part to his own guise. The Colonel survives and sounds the alarm to the Military higher-ups that Gordon is a rogue danger who must be stopped. Since none of this has occurred in public, only Military Brass are aware of the depravity of what is happening, through a series of conversations, the Colonel discusses what Gordon’s end game could potentially be; as a self-announced vengeance-filled angel of God, Gordon plans to nuke Las Vegas for all of it’s sinful influence on America. It is now up to the Colonel and a team of fighter pilots to go after Gordon before he can vaporize Sin City.
As for my earlier stated belief that the action scenes were surprisingly well done for a Cable movie but something looked odd about them, the aerial action footage was actually all taken from an action film that had been released a year or two prior, “Iron Eagle” starring Lou Gossett Jr. The film was not filmed with US troops and locales. “Iron Eagle” was a “Top Gun” knock-off, with Americans in Israeli fighter planes blowing up that scourge of the Middle East, radical Islamic fighter pilots. Filmed in Israel, the footage used by the makers of “Flight of Black Angel” was made filming Israeli fighter jets. If you ever view of “Flight of Black Angel”, you will notice the markings on the planes look kinda like American markings, but not really. The soldiers on the ground in the footage used look foreign, due to the fact that they are actually from another movie. That said, every time a plane gets blown up in this movie it looks like the same shot because most likely it is. Nonetheless, the editing by Barry Zetlin, is commendable, the action scenes (although borrowed) are fairly compelling, especially for a low-budget movie made by the Showtime Network.
A side plot involving a young couple (played by Michael Keys Hall and Michelle Paewk) who are taken hostage by Gordon as he hides his plane in an unnamed US desert while attempting to teach himself how to arm manually a nuclear device. This goes on while the US Military scours the countryside searching for him. A nuclear weapons expert debates with the Colonel concerning Gordon’s ability to arm the nuke against the safety protocols that have supposedly been put in place to prevent the nuke from easily detonating. Predictably, while Gordon has the young couple and their crying infant held hostage, he is studying stolen Government manuals to attempt to figure out how to arm and engage the tactical nuke on his own. The film does a solid job giving the viewer a cliff’s notes concepts of the intricacies of tweaking a nuclear warhead in case you ever happen to have one in your possession. The war room conversation among Military Brass and consultants are also somewhat illuminating, giving the viewer ample intelligence background without being excessively vague.
Although quite a few of the supports are somewhat wooden, and a few of those I might add are burdened with hammy dialogue, the key characters of the Colonel played by Strauss and the psychotic rogue neophyte played by O’Leary are a practical and combustible mix. O’Leary is quite convincing as a Right-Wing idealist who is neither decidedly over-emotional nor ultra sinister, O’Leary plays it as if his character believes in his own heroism. Captain Gordon is consistently tactical, never missing a detail, if he can help it. He begins to make mistakes when the effects of the radiation emanating from the nuclear bomb he is adjusting begin to take effect. Gordon begins to experience radiation sickness, he exposes himself to plutonium while he is making crucial adjustments to the nuclear device, a detail that the Government’s nuclear expert discusses with other Military members in a prior sequence. O’Leary’s stoicism is effective acting, he gives off a genuine presence as a conservative whose psychotic break allows him to believe he is doing the right thing for the greater good. O’Leary previously played the somewhat innocent Minor League Baseball player Jimmy in 1988’s “Bull Durham”.
Strauss is also a welcome presence, authoritative when need be and a logical super-ego to connect with the audience. As the Colonel, he has those late 20-th Century sensibilities in regards to logic and compassion. The ethical core of films such as this where politics and religion have some occupancy is of a civics-minded headset, that integrity and propriety are always the goal. You could equate the character of Captain Gordon with the soldier who has a psychotic breakdown in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, Private Pyle, played by Vince D’Onofrio. The inference here is that the confluence of military skill sets coupled fervent and incessant religious -driven paranoia could hypothetically make for a combustive reaction inside the mind of a person potentially stricken with mental illness.
This picture, while it may have it’s signs of amateurism, left me unnerved, it combines cynicism involving the United States Government and military and how the characterization of the upper levels of the Armed Forces could lead to a sort of procedural corruption. That to identify meaningfully with corporations and how they operate could lead to a perversion of the ethics of the US Military. That acting like an unfeeling and detached business will lead to acts of self-sabotage by highly trained members with destructive weapons at their disposal. Potentially that those trained to kill might turn on their monolithic masters if a certain amount of wisdom is not infused in to the current teachings in the modern military. There is a smugness and self-righteousness to the character of Captain Gordon, a disposition that is emblematic of any estimation of how people now can execute acts of cruelty and harm to others at the Government’s insistence while others cheer. Whether the impulse to commit acts of state-sanctioned violence are correct or not, without a better knowledge of self, “Flight of Black Angel” puts forth the idea that a soldier trained in death but too young in age to favor a benevolent view of society and the world as a whole could potentially wreak havoc on society in a moment of not understanding the permanence and gravity of his actions.
Leave a Reply